Directional Change in Polygonal Distributions: Comparing human and computational directional relations in GIS data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Existing methods for calculating directional relations in polygons (i.e. the directional similarity model, the cone-based model, and the modified cone-based model) were compared to human perceptions of change through an online survey. The results from this survey provide the first empirical validation of computational approaches to calculating directional relations in polygonal spatial data. We have found that while the evaluated methods generally agreed with each other, they varied in their alignment with human perceptions of directional relations. Specifically, translation transformations of the target and reference polygons showed greatest discrepancy to human perceptions and across methods. The online survey was developed using Qualtrics Survey Software, and participants were recruited via online messaging on social media (i.e., Twitter) with hashtags related to geographic information science. In total sixty-one individuals responded to the survey. This survey consisted of nine questions. For the first question, participants indicated how many years they have worked with GIS and/or spatial data. For the remaining eight questions, participants ranked pictorial database scenes according to degrees of their match to query scenes. Each of these questions represented a test case that Goyal and Egenhofer (2001) used to empirically evaluate the directional similarity model; participants were randomly presented with four of these questions. The query scenes were created using ArcMap and contained a pair of reference and target polygons. The database scenes were generated by gradually changing the geometry of the target polygon within each query scene. The relations between the target and reference polygon varied by the type of movement, the scaling change of the polygon, and changes in rotation. The scenarios were varied in order to capture a representative range of variability in polygon movements and changes in real world data. The R statistical computing environment was used to determine the similarity value that corresponds with each database scene based on the directional similarity model, the cone-based model, and the modified cone-based model. Using the survey responses, the frequency of first, second, third, etc. ranks were calculated for each database scene. Weight variables were multiplied by the frequencies to create an overall rank based on participant responses. A rank of one was weighted as a five, a rank of two was weighted as a four, and so on. Spearman’s rank-order correlation was used to measure the strength and direction of association between the rank determined using the three models and the rank determined using participant responses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.091 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".